Åke Järvklo, web specialist at Sogeti
Workshop groups ready to start brainstorming
Presentations of the workshop results
"Any darn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple.” Albert Einstein
On the 12th of November Umeå Institute of Design (UID) invited students, teachers and others to come for one half-day of presentations and workshops about interaction design for a sustainable world. Sogeti sponsored the event and they treated all the participants to a buffet before the lectures and workshops began.
The overall theme of the day was the cradle to cradle concept, C2C. The C2C design is a holistic framework that strives to create systems that are not only efficient but also basically waste free. The concept can be applied to different aspects such as buildings, economics and social systems. It is design with the vision to give eternal life to the material, with no waste. It is about not only creating products less harmful to the environment but creating products that actually contribute to the environment.
First speakers were Charlotta Erlandsdotter Berglund, software testing specialist at Sogeti, and Åke Järvklo, web specialist at Sogeti. Their lecture was called "Sustainability - IT vs. The Real World" and they talked about accessibility, usability and testing, and how important those factors are for building sustainable systems. Avoid waste, think durable and make it usable were their key arguments. Sustainability means usable and reusable. "We need to verify the usability if we want sustainability!”
Next speaker to enter the stage was Nils-Erik Gustavsson from IT-arkitekterna, Stockholm, who is also a visiting lecturer at UID. His presentation was called "The Farmer&s Climate Calculator – how interaction design is helping Swedish farmers cut down on CO2 emissions and save money at the same time”. He talked about the system he is working on, where farmers can keep track of their impact on the environment.
After the presentations all participants were divided into seven groups. Each group had a specific dilemma to which they had to come up with a solution. After about one and a half hour of brainstorming the workshop groups reassembled in the auditorium for presentations of their best ideas. The different dilemmas were:
1. How to replace the use of batteries in daily life
2. How to keep a public kitchen clean
3. How to decrease the excess of paper receipt
4. How to solve the problem with too much noise
5. How to reduce water consumption
6. How to use less post-its
7. How to make people who do not ordinarily recycle to recycle
Most of the solutions had the cradle to cradle approach in common, with an inbound recycling system that turned the used products and trash from a household into electricity for that household, and a system which harvested rain and snow and then used the water to wash the dishes and flush the toilet, and edible post-its or post-its with the text fading after a specific period of time.
